Truth Project #2 - Philosophy and Ethics: “Says Who?”

Apr.1/12 Col.2:1-10

NO FOOLIN’: NOT DECEIVED BY FINE-SOUNDING ARGUMENTS

Well, in honour of this auspicious occasion, I thought I’d forego
the sermon today in favour of a responsive reading of Psalm 119 -
ladies can start, men alternate, and we’ll just work our way through
all 176 verses. HAH! Just kidding - April Fool’s!
That would be one of the milder forms of April
Fool’s jokes – much more pleasant than salt in the sugar bowl, or
vinegar in the kettle, for example. It can be very unpleasant to be
‘fooled’.
Paul doesn’t want the early church to be fooled
either, to fall prey to convincing tricks of alternative teachings. He
writes in Colossians 2:4,8: “I tell you this so that no one may deceive
you by fine-sounding arguments....See to it that no one takes you
captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human
tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on
Christ.” Don’t be deceived, watch out for deceptive philosophy - don’t
be fooled.
This week in part 2 of The Truth Project, we’re
looking at Philosophy and Ethics. Philosophy literally means “love of
wisdom”, it focuses on how we think. If we get mistaken or fooled in
our thinking, that can lead to disastrous consequences. The captain of
that capsized cruise ship was foolish to suppose it would be safe to
leave the charted course and venture in closer to a treacherous
shoreline. So if we’re serious about Jesus’ command to love God with
all our heart, soul, and MIND, we want to get our ‘philosophy’ right.
Here are some examples of philosophical questions [SLIDE 15]: “What is
existence? What is reality? What does it mean to exist? How do I know I
exist? If I do exist, why do I exist? If I think I exist, where did
that thought come from?” [SLIDE 16] “What is thinking? What is reason?
What is logic? What is knowing? If I know something, how can I know
that it is real?” (Remember last week I mentioned the importance of
epistemology, the theory or study of how we can know things.) And a big
philosophical question is the last on the slide, “What is the meaning
and purpose of life?” What’s worth living for; what principles or goals
can we organize our life around so we’re fulfilled, so we don’t get the
end of our life and feel we’ve missed out?
Since the time of the enlightenment, philosophers
have been trying to answer these big questions without reliance on God,
at least, without starting from what we can read in the Bible.
Descartes started from the axiom, “I think, therefore I am,” and tried
to reason his way out from there to ultimate meaning - but his method
is not entirely convincing.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, science was king:
success in study of the natural world led some to theorize that nature
was all that is; to treat the Bible and religion in general as
superstitious, like fairy tales or magic. They trusted only what could
be measured and observed and replicated in a laboratory or by strict
scientific method. If it didn’t fit in their categories, they refused
to consider it within their narrow worldview.
A late 20th century ‘prophet’ championing this view
was Carl Sagan, erstwhile “Humanist of the Year”, featured in the
popular TV series Cosmos. He maintained: [SLIDE 5] “The Cosmos is all
that is, or ever was, or ever will be...Our contemplations of the
cosmos stir us.” [SLIDE 8] “Some part of our being knows this is where
we cam from.We long to return and we can because the cosmos is also
within us...We’re made of star-stuff.”
But there are dangerous assumptions in these
statements. Consider particularly the assertion, [SLIDE 9] “The Cosmos
is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Has kind of a Biblical
ring to its rhetoric, doesn’t it? In fact it’s a blatant challenge to
Biblical thought. Here Sagan by his assumption DEFINES God out of
existence! By saying, “The Cosmos is all that is,” that means God does
not exist - only the Cosmos. Think of the presumption, pride, and
arrogance behind such a statement: to say that something doesn’t exist
presumes infinite knowledge - that just because one hasn’t observed
God, He mustn’t exist anywhere, as if one has ultimate knowledge
including what’s under a rock on the far side of the universe, or in
alternate dimensions beyond this space-time continuum.
Such thinking results in what Dr Del Tackett calls
[SLIDE 11] “The Cosmic Cube” – as if the whole cosmos or universe could
fit in a box [SLIDE 12] and that’s all we can possibly know about. By
definition, if ‘the cosmos is all that is’, there’s NOTHING outside
that box. So, in order to solve the mystery of life, to answer the big
questions about life’s ultimate meaning and purpose, we are limited to
finding the answers by studying just what is observable and measurable
and testable, the natural data inside the box.
Now, such thinking suits many people just fine,
because if you define God out of the picture, you no longer have to
take seriously your ultimate ethical obligations, morality becomes your
choice of flavour, there’s no threat of judgment or eternal damnation,
you’re basically free to do-as-you-choose. Here’s a respected
high-profile public figure advocating it; this is what our public
schools and colleges teach, overtly or otherwise. But it’s the sort of
thing the apostle Paul warned against being ‘taken captive’ by: v8,
“See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive
philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles
of this world rather than on Christ.” Human tradition - this world’s
basic principles - RATHER THAN on Christ: the “rather than” is the
defining God out-of-the-equation.

THE ANT AND THE LEAFS JERSEY

For an illustration of how deficient or short-sighted “The Cosmic
Cube” approach is, imagine you’re an ant crawling across someone’s
bedroom floor. On the floor someone has thrown in disgust a hockey
jersey - say a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey (as Sparling’s sign said this
week, “It must be spring - the Leafs are out!”). But from ant-level, of
course, it’s just a mix of blue and white colours. Now suppose our ant
is of an inquiring sort, and decides to try to figure out what kind of
shape this white irregular thing is. So he starts following the edge
between the blue and white all around the maple leaf, in and out,
zigging and zagging. By the time he gets all the way around, he
probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out what it is. But suppose
our ant has an idea (he’s an exceptionally intelligent ant). He climbs
up the edge of a nearby dresser. From a foot or so away, he might be
able to see the overall outline of that white shape, and realize it’s
something like those objects he’s seen dropping from trees in the
autumn. Whatever is ‘leaf’ in ant parlance. So, PERSPECTIVE provides
UNDERSTANDING: you need a certain distance from the thing in order to
see how it corresponds to other things.
Ah, but then there’s those funny shapes in the
middle of the hockey jersey. Sticks and circles and squiggles - what’s
that? The markings would mean as much to an ant as a screenful of
Arabic or Chinese characters to you and me. What’s the MEANING behind
these? How would one find out? Take that first letter - “T” (make
sound): who told you that was a “T” or made the sound “tuh”? Or the
next, “O” (long ‘o’ or short ‘aw’)? How do you know what “Toronto” is?
Somebody took the time to teach you how to read; perhaps they showed
you a map, or took you there and pointed out the city as you drove by
on the 401: “That’s Toronto”.
In other words, the ant needs something beyond his
immediate experience in order to appreciate the meaning of what he
sees. There is REVELATION involved.
Defining ‘the cosmic cube’ without God shuts oneself
off from the benefit of God’s general and special revelation. God has
delighted to speak to us from ‘beyond the box’. He has put within us
conscience and spirit that react to situations of injustice and
unfairness, that give us a feeling of shame and regret when we’ve hurt
others, that stop us in our tracks to admire a beautiful sunset or get
transported into bliss by a symphony. God has put within us a moral and
spiritual faculty that wonders such questions as, “Is there ultimate
purpose and meaning in life?” That wonders where people go when they
die. That longs for justice to be done in another world if there have
been horrors like the Holocaust in this. Augustine and Pascal talked
about a God-shaped vacuum in our heart only God can fill. Ecclesiastes
3:11 says God has ‘set eternity in the hearts of men’.
God has especially revealed Himself from ‘beyond’ to
us through prophets and apostles, the whole canon of Scripture. Deut
29:29, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things
revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow
all the words of this law.” 2Peter 1:21, “For prophecy never had its
origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried
along by the Holy Spirit.”
But it has been God’s pleasure to reveal Himself
most particularly and vividly in the person of Jesus. What’s outside
the box is a mystery to us, but God has chosen to unpack much of that
mystery for us, so that in Jesus we find the most irrefutable pointers
to life’s meaning and purpose. He’s the ‘gold standard’ of goodness,
grace, and truth. Colossians 1:27, “To them God has chosen to make
known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is
Christ in you, the hope of glory.” This mystery had been “kept hidden
for ages and generations, but is now disclosed”: it’s not a
never-gonna-find-out mystery, blut like a good detective show, the
mystery is ultimately solved, the true facts of the situation are
revealed.
The Bible is a record of how God pulled back the
curtain in Christ so we could know the mystery. In today’s passage,
vv2f, we read that Paul’s purpose is that these early Christians “may
have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may
know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” God doesn’t intend to keep us ‘in
the dark’ - He wants us to have ‘the full riches of complete
understanding’, to know Christ in whom are ‘treasures of wisdom and
knowledge’. Sounds like knowing Christ just ought to be the key to
philosophy, to loving wisdom!

NICE THEORY – BUT CAN YOU LIVE IT?

There are at least a couple of problems with the naturalistic view,
the ‘cosmic cube’, that excludes God from the picture: A) it is false,
by defining reality as limited to what we can see or objectively
measure; B) it is unfeasible, because it makes impossible any ultimate
ground for ethics or meaning in life. In the Truth Project video,
there’s an excerpt from a debate by Dr William Provine, an atheist, in
which he baldly states that in the evolutionary or naturalistic view,
[SLIDE 30] there are “no gods or purposive forces; no ultimate
foundation for ethics; no free will; no life after death; no ultimate
meaning in life.” Those are the logical outworkings of restricting
reality to the “Cosmos”: no ethics, no ultimate meaning in life. Why go
on living?
Brilliant men in history who have followed this line
of thought have ended in a dismal state. Dr Tackett notes the example
of famous scientist and artist Leonardo da Vinci, a genius, extremely
gifted in many areas...[SLIDE 22] “He believed he could find them (ie
universals, the keys to questions of life’s ultimate meaning and
purpose) in mathematics, then science, then art.Ended up empty.Died a
despondent, depressed man without hope...failed to find the universals
of life.” Taken captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy.
And what happens to society when naturalism prevails
and there’s no absolutes, no ultimate foundation for ethics? Ethics
asks questions [SLIDE 27] of “What is right? What is wrong? Who makes
the rules?” My ethics professor in theological college used to sum up
ethics using Proverbs 1:3, “doing what is right and just and fair.” But
if there’s no ultimate yardstick, people quit asking the question of
ethics, ‘what ought to be,’ i.e.how the same group of people should
behave as measured against some higher standard of right and wrong.
Instead we shift from ethics to simply morality, “what IS”, the customs
or ‘mores’ that govern the behaviour of a given group of people. By
rejecting the higher standard of absolutes and universals, we’re left
with what RC Sproul refers to as “statistical ethics”, which asserts
that what’s normal is ‘right’, and that behaviour can only be judged
against the background of survey data or popular consent. In other
words, if 51% of the population thinks it’s OK, it must be right!

QUIT HALFING IT

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of OUR ultimate purpose in
life. Let’s ask a different question: what is GOD’S ultimate purpose
for us in life? What’s the Lord’s goal or aim for us? Won’t that likely
give us a clue to how to find true meaning? Consider these verses:
Romans 8:29, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be
conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn
among many brothers.” (The Father loved the Son so much He wanted a
whole bunch more like Him!) Ephesians 1:4, “For [God] chose us in
[Jesus] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in
his sight.” Philippians 3:21 forecasts that Jesus, “by the power that
enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our
lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” And 1John
3:2-3, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be
has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall
be like him, for we shall see him as he is. [NOW, NOTE HOW THAT HOPE
IMPACTS OUR ETHICS AND BEHAVIOUR TODAY] Everyone who has this hope in
him purifies himself, just as he is pure.” Our Saviour and Lord Jesus
is our ultimate, absolute, point of reference! God’s purpose is for us
to be transformed to be like His dear Son.
Paul sums it up this way in 2Cor 3:18: “we...are
being transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory, which
comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” Transformation is our
vocation, our calling, stepping into the glorious ‘new self’ with which
God desires to outfit us (Eph 4:24).
Yet, it would seem many church people are slow to
get the message. Too many have been deceived by hollow philosophy, by
this world’s basic principles. [SLIDE 36] We are in a Cosmic Battle -
God’s truth vs the world’s belief-systems and associated lies. Social
researcher George Barna reports [SLIDE 32] that amongst the general
American population, only 4% have a Biblical worldview; but what about
in the churches? Amongst the ‘born-again’ American population, only 9%
had a Biblical worldview. Not surprisingly, Barna also found that we in
the church - 91% of whom share an un-Biblical worldview with others -
don’t ACT that different from the world (eg marriage break-up,
pornography use, etc). Is it all that surprising we ACT the same if we
THINK the same? Who’s being fooled?
If you want to be a genuine follower of Jesus, you
need to let Him be Lord of EVERY area of your life, starting with your
thinking, your worldview. Romans 12:2 says, [SLIDE 39] “Do not conform
any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your minds...”
That means start praying and applying Scriptural
truth with the Lord’s help to every area of our life. Chuck Colson
notes, [SLIDE 33] “The church’s singular failure in recent decades has
been the failure to see Christianity as a life system, or worldview,
that governs every area of existence.”
ChristianWeek tells the story of Aaron Gillespie,
who for 13 years was the drummer in a popular ministry-oriented
metal-core band called “Underoath”. The band did well, selling
over a million copies. But Gillespie left in 2010 to become a Christian
singer-songwriter and worship leader. He admits there was a period in
his life when he stopped trusting God. All he cared about was the music
industry, and it was having a negative impact not only on his
relationship with God, but also his relationship with his wife Janie.
He says he had to “hit rock bottom before I even made [God] a
priority.” God got his attention when he took a mission trip to Africa.
Seeing people who have nothing worshipping wholeheartedly reminded
Gillsepie of what’s really important.
He says, “God called me away from Underoath and
called me to a place of just being really open and honest about my
faith...I was in a bad spot for a long time. Just the last few years,
God really just grabbed my heart and said, ‘You need to either do it or
don’t.There’s no more time for halfing it.’”
What about you – are you ‘halfing it’? Does Jesus
have ALL of you, including your thought life, your worldview? Is He key
to your sense of ultimate meaning and purpose – is He central in what
you’re living for?
Gillespie concludes that worship is a way of life.
He says, “It’s your everything - it’s not just a song or a time, it’s
your life...Whether you’re a barista, a doctor, a lawyer, whatever
you’re doing, [if you’re a Christian] you’re worshipping the Lord with
your life.” Let’s pray.